Flawed routers flood University of Wisconsin internet time server (2003)

  > Are incidents such as this a likely side-effect of ubiquitous, low-cost, perhaps even disposable Internet hosts?

The old-fashioned aesthetic almost feels like a cue what I'm looking at won't be slop.

In 2003, Network Address Translation (NAT) was becoming the default LAN IP management scheme, for two reasons: (1) IPv4 space was at the beginnings of its inevitable resource restrictions, and (2) the perceived security of the NAT had effectively become what people believed a firewall performed.

In those old days of the middle Internet and early web, it was still fairly common to visit an IP address (IPv4 - IPv6 was ratified but still being interoperability tested, barely a toy yet), you could visit an IP address directly without using the DNS.

Peer distribution was often a derivative of the sneakernet (carrying media around on your person), emailing long lists of popular but undiscoverable media content.

The concept of the home gateway device was young but functional. You could go to Best Buy and get a router to pair with your CPE; integration of CPEs and routers had already happened but it was still common to see them as separate devices.

Back then, traffic was a sliver of what it is now; a systems operator might have personally seen anomalous traffic, ingress and maybe even more unlikely, egress, and had the notion "that ain't right". These days we rely on incredible solutions that have existed for a long, long time to alert us, and self manage, these types of events.

While experimenting with codex this past week (old guy trying to participate but I gotta stretch out first, old), I tossed a pair of 8.8x3 inch monitors on a pi4 and told codex to 'go wild' making me a poor man's ATC kit, with a pile of html real-time gauges of everything I could think of - outer space, space station, planes, weather, home assistant temperatures, all of it.

And then at the outset I asked codex, hey, how often are you hitting these endpoints? How often do you ask the web what time sunrise is? Ah, every 900 seconds.

And so my Abe Simpson clincher, is, it's very easy for me to see how the ballast of the data on the internet is just bots, talking to bots, and how a 10 second NTP selection 2 decades ago was just the same move, before the immense scaling and false resource abundance we have today, allowed it to continue unchallenged.

(LISA is now SRECon)